May 27

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

A New Hampshire Gazette (May 27, 1776).

“Occasional HAND-BILLS, to contain all the interesting and important Intelligence of the Country.”

A broadsheet bearing the title A New-Hampshire Gazette carried only two advertisements.  A notice from Robert L. Fowle, the printer filled half of the first column on the first page.  A brief advertisement, only three lines, completed the final column on the other side of the sheet.  It announced, “A few Copies of Common Sense, and sundry other Pamphlets, BLANKS, &c. &.c &c. sold at the Printing-Office in Exeter.”

A New Hampshire Gazette (May 27, 1776).

The notice, dated at “Exeter, May 22, 1776,” informed the public that Fowle “removed his Printing-Office from Boston, to this Town, the present CAPITAL of the Colony of New-Hampshire.”  He solicited job printing and advertisements, though he may have meant broadsides and handbills rather than newspaper notices since he had concerns about the prospects of establishing a “regular News-Paper in the present disord’d Times” because “it is presum’d [it] would not be properly supported.”  Instead, he proposed printing and distributing “occasional HAND-BILLS, to contain all the interesting and important Intelligence of the Country” if “this and the near Towns will take off a few Hundred Copies weekly.”  Fowle planned to charge three pence for each handbill-newspaper “with an Allowance” or appropriate discount for “any suitable Person or Persons that will take them by the Hundred weekly, and ride round the Country.”  In addition, he requested that the “Innholders in this Colony … put up this Advertisement in their Houses” to help publicize the proposed handbill-newspapers.

Fowle indicated that the “following Articles [were] the last Advices from England” and another of the “occasional HAND-BILLS” “perhaps will appear next Monday.”  In his monumental History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820, Clarence S. Brigham states that Fowle established his New-Hampshire Gazette with a prospectus in the form of a handbill on May 22, 1776, with another handbill “promised for May 27, although no copy has been located.”  The first regular issue of the New-Hampshire Gazette, or, the Exeter Morning Chronicle, Brigham continues, appeared on June 1, “was numbered vol. 1, no. 3, and referred to the two ‘Hand-Bills’ previously published.”  That issue and most subsequent ones were “single sheets and without the name of the publisher in the imprint.”[1]

I believe that Brigham misidentifies the handbill-newspaper in the collections of the collections of the American Antiquarian Society as the first of the handbills rather than the second.  The date on Fowle’s notice, May 22, appeared immediately below the masthead, but that entire notice likely had been reprinted without revision from the first handbill-newspaper.  The “Fresh Advices” that followed on the first page relayed news from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, not “the last Advices from England.”  The news on the other side of the sheet had “EXETER, May 27th, 1776,” for the dateline, though some of that content relayed “Advices by Friday’s Post from Boston.”  With news dated May 27, this handbill could not have been printed on May 22.  In addition, May 27 was a Monday, the day that Fowle indicated “another [handbill-newspaper] perhaps will appear.”  All this evidence suggests that no copy of the first handbill-newspaper has been located.  The known copy should be properly dated as May 27, 1776.

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[1] Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820 (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1947), 454.

Slavery Advertisements Published May 27, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Boston-Gazette (May 27, 1776).

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Connecticut Courant (May 27, 1776).

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Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet (May 27, 1776).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 27, 1776).

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New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury (May 27, 1776).

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Norwich Packet (May 27, 1776).

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Norwich Packet (May 27, 1776).

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Norwich Packet (May 27, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published May 27, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Courant (May 27, 1776).

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New-Hampshire Gazette (May 27, 1776).

May 26

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago this week?

Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (May 25, 1776).

“A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS FOR SALE … By DIXON & HUNTER.”

The May 25, 1776, edition of John Dixon and William Hunter’s Virginia Gazette concluded with a “CATALOGUE OF BOOKS” for sale at their printing office.  It filled most of the final column on the last page.  An advertisement for a “VIEW of the late BATTLE at CHARLESTOWN,” now known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, appeared immediately above it.  Dixon and Hunter also sold that print.  While they certainly wished to generate revenue beyond newspaper subscriptions and advertisements, it appears that the printers also used these notices as filler to complete that edition of their newspaper.

Consider, for instance, the contents of the book catalogue.  Dixon and Hunter updated a book catalogue that previously appeared in the Virginia Gazette six months earlier.  That version classified books by size – folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos – and listed titles in alphabetical order by author.  The printers made adjustments to the folios, quartos, and octavos listed in the new catalogue based on their current inventory.  They did not, however, include any duodecimos.  Indeed, the list of octavos ended abruptly with “Martin’s English Dictionary.”  This indicates that Dixon and Hunter included as much of the catalogue as would fit in that final column but did not make it a priority to publish the entire catalogue in that issue.  They may have been printing and distributing the catalogue as a separate broadside or pamphlet, taking advantage of type already set when they needed material for the last page of the May 25 issue.

When they did so, the printers did not attempt to highlight those titles that they thought most likely to attract customers, nor did they make any sales pitch except stating they sold the books “at a low Advance.”  In other words, they charged reasonable prices with only a small markup from what they paid to acquire the imported books.  They did expect customers to pay “READY MONEY” at the time of purchase rather than take away any of the titles on credit.  In the masthead, Dixon and Hunter gave the prices for an annual subscription to the newspaper (twelve shillings and six pence) and running advertisements “of a moderate Length” (three shillings for the first insertion and two shilling for each subsequent insertion).  They also stated that they did job printing “in the NEATEST Manner, with Care and Expedition.” Like most other newspaper printers, they supplemented revenue from printing with revenue from selling books.  They hoped that the incomplete book catalogue would entice prospective customers to find out what other volumes they offered for sale.

May 25

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Freeman’s Journal (May 25, 1776).

“The Printing-Business, in its different branches carried on with care and fidelity.”

When Benjamin Dearborn circulated subscription proposals for establishing a “NEW WEEKLY PAPER ENTITLED The FREEMAN’s JOURNAL, OR New-Hampshire GAZETTE” in April 1776, he stated that “[a]s soon as a sufficient number of Subscribers appear, the first number will be publish’d.”  It did not take long for him to gain enough subscribers to begin publishing the newspaper.  On May 25, he distributed the first issue.

It may have worked to Dearborn’s advantage that Daniel Fowle, the printer of the New-Hampshire Gazette, suspended his newspaper in January or February.  It had been the only newspaper printed in the colony, which meant that residents relied even more on newspapers printed in Massachusetts and other colonies to supply them with news about current events, including the progress of the war and meetings of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia and provincial conventions throughout the colonies.  In the subscription proposals, Dearborn declared that the Freeman’s Journal would include “all authentic domestic intelligence worth notice; together with the most material Extracts from the Southern and other papers.”  He may have received some of those newspapers via exchange networks with other printers, though, like other printers, he would have also participated in a process of reprinting news from one newspaper to another in a chain of disseminating information.

The inaugural issue of the Freeman’s Journal featured a small number of advertisements, enough to fill the final column on the last page.  As many other printers did, Dearborn used the colophon that ran across the bottom of that page as an advertisement for his printing office that concluded each issue week after week: “PORTSMOUTH: Printed by BENJAMIN DEARBORN, near the Parade, where this Paper may be had at Eight Shillings L[awful]. M[oney]. Per year, one half at entrance.  The Printing-Business, in its different branches carried on with care and fidelity.”  New subscribers had to pay four shillings when they began their subscription.  Customers of all sorts could have job printing, such as handbills and broadsides, done at Dearborn’s printing office.  That gave the printer another revenue stream to supplement subscriptions and advertisements.

Slavery Advertisements Published May 25, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Constitutional Gazette (May 25, 1776).

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Providence Gazette (May 25, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (May 25, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (May 25, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (May 25, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (May 25, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (May 25, 1776).

May 24

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (May 24, 1776).

“For a catalogue, and terms, apply to the PRINTER.”

In the spring of 1776, Alexander Purdie’s Virginia Gazette carried and advertisement for “A VALUABLE LIBRARY of BOOKS, consisting of Law, Physick, Divinity, &c. &c.”  Using “&c.” (the abbreviation for et cetera commonly used in the eighteenth century) indicated that the library included books on many other topics.  The advertisement did not list any titles but instead instructed interested parties to “apply to the PRINTER” to receive a catalogue and learn more about the terms of the sale.  Purdie may have generated additional revenue by printing the catalogue for the anonymous advertiser …

Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (May 25, 1776).

… or his competitors, John Dixon and William Hunter, may have printed the catalog.  An advertisement with nearly identical copy simultaneously ran in their newspaper.  It announced, “A VALUABLE LIBRAY OF BOOKS TO BE SOLD.”  It also told readers how to learn more: “For a CATALOGUE, and TERMS, apply to Printers of this Gazette.”  Perhaps the catalogue was an example of the “PRINTING WORK done at this Office in the NEATEST Manner, with Care and Expedition,” that Dixon and Hunter promoted in the masthead.  Both advertisements included a notation to remind the compositor to run the advertisement for four weeks.  The two advertisements almost certainly referred to the same “LIBRARY of BOOKS” for sale and the same catalogue.

The anonymous advertiser arranged for an additional form of marketing media, a catalogue, to supplement the notices that appeared in the newspapers printed in Williamsburg.  That catalogue may have been a small pamphlet, though it could have been a broadside printed only on one side or a broadsheet printed on both, depending on how many books it listed and the preferences of the advertiser and the decisions of the compositor.  The advertiser most likely did not have catalogues printed in both printing offices.  That meant coordinating the delivery of the catalogue from one printing office to the other.  No matter which printing office produced the catalogue, it increased the amount of advertising media available and circulating in Virginia in the 1770s.  Newspaper advertisements suggest that other kinds of marketing materials were more prevalent than the number of those that have survived in research libraries, historical societies, and private collections.

Slavery Advertisements Published May 24, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Gazette (May 24, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (May 24, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (May 24, 1776).

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Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (May 24, 1776).

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Supplement to the Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (May 24, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published May 24, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Essex Journal (May 24, 1776).

May 23

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

New-York Journal (May 23, 1776).

“AN ORATION, Delivered … on the Re-Interment of the Remains of … JOSEPH WARREN.”

Joseph Warren was an American hero, not just a hero in Massachusetts.  That was part of the point of the proliferation of local editions of the oration that Perez Morton delivered “on the Re-Interment of the Remains of the late Most Worshipful GRAND MASTER, … President of the late CONGRESS of this Colony, AND MAJOR-GENERAL of the Massachusetts Forces; Who was slain in the battle of BUNKER’s HILL, [on] June 17, 1775.”  When the siege of Boston ended with the departure of British forces on March 17, 1776, Warren’s brothers searched for his body.  After identifying it by an artificial tooth, they arranged for a Masonic funeral and burial in the Granary Burial Ground.  A few weeks later, John Gill advertised Morton’s oration from the occasion.  It met with such demand that he issued a second edition.

Yet Gill was not the only printer to publish, advertise, and distribute the oration in memory of Warren.  John Dunlap, the printer of Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, produced an edition in Philadelphia.  Simultaneously, John Holt, the printer of the New-York Journal, published yet another edition.  Advertisements for the various local editions featured nearly identical copy drawn from the extensive title of the oration.  Not only did that relieve the printers of composing their own advertisements, but it also provided readers in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania with a succinct overview of Warren’s most significant achievements, his commitment as a Patriot, and the sacrifice he made for the American cause.  As the war entered its second year and more colonizers advocating for declaring independence rather than seeking redress of grievances within the imperial system, newspapers throughout the colonies regularly carried letters, resolutions, and other items that made John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress, and George Washington, the commander of the Continental Army, known far and wide.  Yet the movement benefited from having even more heroes for Patriots to venerate.  The local editions of Morton’s oration in memory of Warren and the advertisements for in newspapers that circulated far beyond Boston, New York, and Philadelphia played a part in constructing a pantheon of American heroes.